Editorial: The NFL should start with itself in new push to promote racial tolerance

Using the n-word or any other racial slur is unacceptable, whether it’s on the football field or around the office water cooler. But if the NFL really wants to establish a zero-tolerance policy on racial expletives, as its rules committee is considering, the league’s highest ranks need to clean up their act first.

Start with the Redskins.

The team nickname for Washington’s franchise — in the nation’s capital, no less — is a total embarrassment. It should have been dumped decades ago.

But during a Super Bowl interview, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell continued to back Washington owner Daniel Snyder’s refusal to change the mascot. Even after being asked “if he would call a (Native American) a Redskin to his face.” (He sidestepped the question and defended Snyder’s right to retain the name.)

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Stanford University changed its nickname from the Indians to the Cardinal in 1972. St. John’s University two years later became the Red Storm instead of the Redmen. More than a dozen colleges have joined them.

But not the NFL.

Mercury News columnist Mark Purdy has expressed his outrage often and eloquently. Last fall he wrote: “How pathetic that, in the year 2013, we’re still even having this debate about whether a mascot based on a racial slur is, you know, a mascot based on a racial slur.”

USA Today columnist Christine Brennan, who once covered the team for the Washington Post, offers this question for Goodell: “Could an expansion team enter any league in any sport today with the nickname Redskins?” It’s simply unimaginable, for all the right reasons.

Defenders argue that a high percentage of Native Americans say they are not offended by the name. That doesn’t make it right. After all, use of the n-word during NFL games is mostly by black players. Apparently they think it’s OK. If so, why should the league object?

But many African-Americans do find the word offensive. And many Native Americans are appalled at “Redskins.”

Snyder last fall wrote to the team’s fan base that the name “was, and continues to be, a badge of honor.” Some team officials claim it was intended to honor Lone Star Dietz, a Sioux, who was the coach when the team moved to Washington in 1932.

That is, pardon the expression, bull. The nickname was the brainchild of former owner George Preston Marshall, one of the most notorious bigots in NFL history.

Marshall’s team was the last in the NFL to add nonwhite players, and he was proud of it. He refused to sign black players until, in 1961, he relented under pressure and drafted Ernie Davis, the first African-American Heisman Trophy winner. Davis reportedly refused to play for Marshall, so Marshall traded him.

Those who know Snyder say he’s not a racist. But as long as the NFL lets him call his team the Redskins, its self-righteous zeal for fighting racism in words exchanged by players on the field is a sham.